The advance copy of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom came with a bonus CD. I’m not sure what was on it. Perhaps Franzen reading his novel’s twenty-six-page prologue? A “book trailer”? A Sims™ module in which you, too, can alienate your neighbors while helping to gentrify St. Paul’s Ramsey Hill neighborhood? I’ll never know. I threw it out, to subtract a few ounces from the tare weight of this 562-page boxcar of a novel. But, as we now know, that CD was the least of the extratextual fanfare trailing Freedom into the public eye.
First there was an accidental endorsement when President Obama was photographed with the book on vacation. Then came the critical notice—though “trumpet voluntary” is putting it more accurately: Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times Book Review was transported, even transformed; the Times’s Michiko Kakutani forgot Franzen had called her “the stupidest person in New York City” long enough to praise Freedom as “galvanic” and an “indelible portrait of our times.” There followed a bitter but mercifully short-lived debate about gender bias at the Times, or, as Meghan O’Rourke put it, “why women are so infrequently heralded as great novelists.”
Just when it seemed the “narrative” might shift to the book itself, from the outburst of enthusiasm it had enjoyed, Oprah Winfrey did the unthinkable, i.e., the inevitable: She made Freedom her Book Club selection. Winfrey had bestowed this honor on Franzen’s 2001 novel, The Corrections, only to withdraw it when Franzen voiced skepticism about the Book Club’s role in American literature. Now we know that Franzen has learned his lesson, that Oprah is the bigger man, and that Freedom is so brilliant that it dissolves grudges as a ray of God’s own holy light pierces a storm cloud.
There’s a term for criticism of something seen as above criticism: the “inevitable backlash.” This formulation is as fearful as it is peremptory and dismissive. It wishes that critical response weren’t so unruly, that quality could be quantified in some agreed-upon way—the same bean-counting impulse that compelled some of Franzen’s detractors to determine the male-to-female ratio of Times book coverage.
If Franzen’s novel “holds up a mirror” to the “way we live now,” it does so as much by the reactions it elicits as by its content. It may be that the most insistent praise comes from those who refuse to entertain the possibility that they inhabit a world, as The Atlantic’s B. R. Myers disparaged the America of Franzen’s novel, “in which nothing important can happen.”
I say “they” and not “we” because, truth be told, the “we” this novel represents is rather circumscribed; it is the “we” of people with the luxury, which is to say the money and time, to think about themselves too much, until their small problems turn into large ones. They are people who attend respectable colleges, who think about environmental issues, and who, if I may be permitted a movie quote, “care about books [and] interesting films and things.” (There are a few sympathetic yokels, but they remain safely on the periphery, gazing into their dip spit.) To the book’s credit, its exemplars of this “we”—Patty and Walter Berglund, whose unraveling marriage and family are the focus of Freedom—are not only complex characters but also, after several hundred pages, inescapably unlikeable ones.
Franzen has a devastating talent for rendering a certain kind of modern speech, and at moments like this one I had to fling the book aside:
“No, of course, I’m the villain here. Negative old me. I’m sure that’s how it looks to you.”
“Maybe there’s a reason it looks that way. Have you considered that?”
[. . .]
“I would only point out that you did sort of lie to me . . . . Which, lying, maybe not the most mature thing.”
“Your question wasn’t friendly!”
The exchange is between Patty and her son, Joey, who has disappointed her by becoming a Republican and moving in with his girlfriend and her downmarket family, who are the Berglunds’ neighbors. How to describe Patty’s tone, here and elsewhere? It blends sarcasm and mock self-effacement with a studiously noncommital use of conflict-resolution jargon. (An early scene in which she confronts Joey’s girlfriend’s stepfather—for our purposes a beer-swilling, jersey-wearing lout—for noisily sawing trees in his own yard, is a perfect example.) It is thrillingly accurate and almost intolerably irritating.
That’s Freedom, more or less—a book that is marvelously observant, at great length, about a time and place that has little to recommend itself to the literary imagination. It’s basically journalistic, Tom Wolfe for readers who won’t abide Wolfe’s septuagenarian howlers. The scenes in which Joey goes to college, or stays with his college friend’s neoconservative family for Thanksgiving, or lusts after said friend’s beautiful but patly narcissistic sister, read like marginally better-written outtakes from I Am Charlotte Simmons.
There is only one howler in Freedom: 150 pages are presented as Patty’s memoirs, “Composed at Her Therapist’s Suggestion,” and titled, in a pointless nod to the Bush “era,” Mistakes Were Made. Here we have a lengthy section sounding only notionally distinct from Franzen’s lyrical-colloquial voice (to take a niggling but unignorable example, Patty and Franzen are both sweet on the word “literally,” which appears in the book over two dozen times). It could have been third-person omniscient, but is instead Patty, a life-long jock, writing about herself in the third person. This requires not suspension of but contempt for disbelief, in a novel where verisimilitude is a major selling point.
The plot, though it spans decades, is straightforward. Young Patty fell in love with both the earnest, principled Walter and his best friend, Richard, a painfully charismatic and self-centered musician. She chose Walter, and regretted it, or thought she regretted it, for most of the rest of her life. (It’s hard not to sympathize with her; say what you will about Richard’s negative qualities, at least he’s more interested in sex than in songbird habitats.) Patty makes mistakes, the nature of which will be easy to guess; her son makes mistakes, big, ripped-from-the-headlines mistakes to do with Iraq and profiteering; her husband makes mistakes, mostly by doing business with the wrong people in his fight to save something called a Cerulean Warbler.
All three of them redeem themselves, in such accessibly cinematic ways that one can’t help wondering if Franzen is angling to get Freedom optioned. Franzen’s big mistake, which is unlikely to register with the “we” he’s describing, is taking it for granted that it matters to any sane person whether the Berglunds redeem themselves. One needn’t like a character to find her engaging in a novel, and much of Freedom, despite—or because of—its soap-opera overtones, is engaging. It has an undeniable momentum. But if you people a book with characters who deserve a comeuppance, who should learn the hard way that they have led trivial and self-involved lives, and then you eliminate all their hardships in a flourish of wish-fulfillment and sentimentality, what is the reader to think but that you missed your own point, or simply never cared?
Why is this book called Freedom? Freedom is “the way we live now”—our relative prosperity lets us wield freedom as we please, for good or for ill. Yet the salient point about Franzen’s characters is not that they have too much freedom; it’s that, as one character puts it, they don’t know “how to live.” That is not an indictment of freedom, which is stubbornly neutral, but of the unmooring of self-control and humility that comes of being too convinced of one’s own significance. To the breathless conviction that Franzen has shown us ourselves, many American families, happy and unhappy, might well ask: What do you mean, “we”?
We who read book reviews are familiar with code words or phrases like “epic,” “grand in scope,” “sprawling”—all of which mean, “Get comfortable, this is going to take a while.” There are, of course, many excellent books whose length is a boon, but piling on the pages is frequently a means of stacking the deck. Spend enough time with any cast of characters, even the Berglunds, and you’ll miss them a little when they’re gone. Familiarity breeds first contempt, then exhaustion, resignation, and grudging affection. See also: your own family.
“Ambitious” is another code word for “long,” but genuine ambition takes other forms, like attempting a lot with very little. The Frenchman Jean-Christophe Valtat’s English-language debut, 03 (translated by Mitzi Angel), clocks in at around 15,000 words, but it is a snapshot of adolescence far stranger and more compelling than we have in, say, Joey Berglund. 03 is a monologue, an eighty-plus-page paragraph, representing the thoughts of a miserable but mentally vibrant French teenager as, waiting for a bus, he considers his attraction to, or fascination with, a mildly retarded girl across the way:
Once you knew, it was easy to make sense of her thin adolescent frame, her black hair spiking up on her little head as though she were enduring some slow, endless horror . . . . Imagine someone whose growth had suddenly stopped, useless and discouraged or, seeing that it had dwarfed the rest of her, had chosen to freeze her body at a jarring, already awkward fourteen years of age.
Short, French, and staring at a retarded girl—surely this is not the David to Franzen’s Goliath? Well, no. The books aim for and hit different targets. The comparison is made to suggest that the eureka of recognition provided by Franzen’s multigenerational saga, the sense that this guy is really paying attention to the minutiae of our cultural moment, may be a headier but more ephemeral pleasure than Valtat’s shudder of unfamiliarity.
Where Freedom describes the paradoxically stultifying effects of too much choice, 03 is a sustained wail against too little. The narrator is trapped in an almost comically grim suburb called Montpérilleux, where he lives with his family in something called the “‘Phoenix Houses’—a strange choice of name, given that it conjured up, with reckless optimism, a pyromaniac’s matchstick.” (The world from where he stands is just “cold magma frozen into tarmac by the organized disaster called society.”) He has no scooter, “much less a car”; he listens to Joy Division and the Cure, not the bands “at the top of the charts, and also invariably the crappiest”; and he admits a “pathological failure to meet the standards of adolescents [his] age.”
So far, a pretty standard template of teen angst: You can’t choose where you live, who your parents are, or what it will take to earn your peers’ acceptance. But these constraints tend to drive one inward, and the interior life, honestly rendered, rarely seems familiar to an outsider. This narrator’s thoughts, obsessed with arrested development, stagnation, imprisonment, and corruption, have little in common with the sexual anxiety that is, in American popular culture, the sum total of the adolescent experience (apart, of course, from cyber-bullying).
Now compare this narrator—by turns anxious, pompous, ridiculous, and right on the money—with Joey Berglund. Joey is the beneficiary of generous authorial attention, of thousands of words of history and detail, while his sister, Jessica, barely registers in the reader’s imagination. But he never feels fully human. He is like Miles in The Turn of the Screw, more than a little too self-possessed for comfort. Joey’s precocity, his refusal to accept distinctions between child and adult, and his preternaturally intense romantic relationship, make him monstrous.
Why should this diminish him as a character? Joey is a sharply-drawn surrogate for a generation of young Americans who, we are given to believe, regard money, influence, and unlimited choice as their birthright. But the fact is, for all the “warts and all” specificity of Franzen’s portraiture, for all its credibility, Joey never transcends his didactic function: He is a little shit whose narrowly avoided reckoning becomes a warrant for even greater self-regard. “Don’t you think I should be, like, morally worried about this?” he asks his absurdly devoted wife, Connie, when it comes time to make his pivotal decision. If you have to ask what you’re meant to feel, you’re not feeling it.
Valtat’s book is more true to adolescence, in that it deals with powerful feelings which assert themselves whether or not they’re appropriate; these feelings are endlessly interrogated, but not in the timid context of Will I still sleep like a baby tonight if . . . ? Will I still be “happy”? Such feelings prove more disturbing to read about, but they’re also more attuned to what inner life is like for those not engaged in the compulsive self-revision and self-mythologizing that eat away at the “mistakes were made” Berglunds. Valtat’s teenage narrator has fewer choices than any of Franzen’s characters, but in his mind, in his hyperarticulate rant, he seems freer—and is freer to capture our interest.
A word about the voice of 03’s narrator is in order. James Wood in The New Yorker wrote that the speaker is “a writer who is remembering his adolescence,” but blink and you might miss the textual proof, a fleeting mention of “my beginnings as a writer.” The reference could be interpreted in a variety of ways—perhaps the narrator keeps a diary, or scribbles poetry inside le Trapper-Keeper—though Wood’s assumption, apart from most likely being correct, is a good way to justify the fact that this is not by any stretch the voice of a teenager. Even a young Joy Division fan is unlikely to use the phrase “danse macabre” or refer to cars and motorcycles as “sexual prostheses.”
All the same, the reader hears this as the real-time thoughts of a boy waiting for a bus. And it works, in a way that Patty’s refined, polished mini-memoir does not. Valtat’s embroidered, sometimes cringe-makingly exaggerated prose stands in for the hormonally heightened experience of adolescence itself. Patty’s stands for nothing but her creator’s impatience (I won’t suggest that Franzen couldn’t have made her voice more credible if he’d really wanted to).
After a false voice and a weird, rambling, practically oneiric one, it was nice to find in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad a dozen or so different, and plain-old convincing, ones. Goon Squad counts music and time as its major themes. The title could be an allusion to David Bowie’s “Fashion” or Elvis Costello’s “Goon Squad”; it is, in any event, a contrived but memorable metaphor for the ravages of time, signaled by a character who asks, “Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?” No, it doesn’t even sound like one, but I’ll play along. Goon Squad is an uneven book, partly because it comprises thirteen stories that neither add up to a “novel” nor quite stand on their own, but mainly because it is ambitious in yet another sense: it takes risks.
Perhaps you’ve read that one “chapter” is actually a printed PowerPoint presentation. Ever since Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, with its frankly disgraceful flip-book of a man flying upward into the World Trade Center, I’ve been inclined to ignore books that flirt with this sort of gimmickry. Egan pulls it off, but, then again, why attempt something like that in the first place? What does it say about Egan that she can’t resist trying a pastiche of David Foster Wallace that is also a parody of celebrity journalism; a depiction of a publicist’s relationship with a genocidal dictator; and a story that breathes new life into the dried-out clay of Sleazy Record Exec, all in the same book? Is she showing off? Overreaching?
The jaded reader will ponder this more than once in the course of Goon Squad, but the rest of the time, following Egan’s massive dramatis personae on their forking and often intersecting paths, he will be far too busy enjoying himself and wondering what’s next. The reader goes on safari. The reader goes to Naples. The reader goes to a country club. The reader goes for a swim in the East River and drowns. A story in the second person? Surely that won’t work. Wrong again:
It takes all your strength to tread water and yank in breath. Eventually the cold begins to feel almost tropically warm against your skin. The shrieking in your ears subsides, and you can breathe again. You look around, startled by the mythic beauty of what surrounds you: water encircling an island. A distant tugboat jutting out its rubbery lip. The Statue of Liberty. A thunder of wheels on the Brooklyn Bridge, which looks like the inside of a harp. Church bells, meandering and off-key, like the chimes your mother hangs on the porch. You’re moving fast, and when you look for Drew you can’t find him.
Egan’s final chapter, a conventional dystopian satire of things—like texting, technology, “astroturfing,” and security paranoia—that all right-thinking people already despise, is the book’s only unqualified failure. It wants to mock marketing, but all it really does is hastily repackage the present. (Youngsters of the future, however, don’t curse—which means that Egan either has a few very juvenile ideas about what constitutes authenticity, or isn’t paying attention.) Against the odds, though, this story reads like a parody of a satire, and works beautifully as a reminder that, “goon” though time may be, it holds surprises in store at which even our sharpest literary minds cannot guess.
“Overreaching” was the word that sprang to mind when I read about Matt Burgess’s Dogfight, A Love Story—but so, of course, did “ambition” and “risk.” Burgess, with whom, I am obligated to inform you, I went to college, is a graduate of the University of Minnesota MFA program. You wouldn’t know it from the plot of his debut. Instead of a gentle and lyrical meditation on something or other, Burgess gives his reader the propulsive, violent, even harrowing tale of Alfredo Batista, a nineteen-year-old Puerto Rican drug dealer from Burgess’s native Jackson Heights, Queens.
The story ignites, smolders, and detonates over the course of a weekend, as Alfredo prepares for his older brother’s release from prison. The plan, which the long tradition of crime writing tells us is not going to go smoothly, is to welcome José—now Tariq, a Muslim convert—back with such fanfare that he might let bygones be bygones. The bygones, in this case, are Isabel, Tariq’s former girlfriend, and her unborn child, for whom Alfredo is responsible. Naturally this is not a complete shock to Tariq, but, as the reader soon learns, Alfredo has good reason to be suspicious of his brother’s capacity to forgive.
Dogfight is an intricately, and sometimes a touch too cinematically, plotted book, so I’ll leave out, well, all of that. It’s more fun if you don’t know what’s coming, and what impressed me most was not Burgess’s ability to concoct a story but his willingness to take up a daunting challenge, not least for the debut novelist: inhabiting the world and “head space” of someone dramatically unlike himself. Burgess may be from Queens, but his acknowledgments page makes no secret of the fact that he is hardly an underworld type. This book took research, and empathy, beyond simply breathing the heady air of his old neighborhood.
It doesn’t always succeed. The dialogue feels true to life, but then I’m in no position to say. But the prose often slips into a register that even a charitable reader would have a hard time squaring with a lower-class teenager or his milieu. There is too much deus ex machina, too. One character’s autistic-sounding ability to memorize strings of numbers makes several puzzling cameos before, finally, reappearing to steal the show. This kind of thing belongs too much to the movies, and undermines the fundamental brutality and truthfulness of Burgess’s story. All in all, though, it’s a relief to know that there are writers for whom “the way we live now” encompasses something much broader and stranger than the parochial, didja-ever-notice preoccupations which have overawed that indispensible but sometimes disappointingly myopic Royal We—the critics.